5 Badass Movie Heroes (Who Were Actually Just Really Lucky)

#2. Aladdin -- Aladdin Goads Jafar into a Ridiculously Specific Wish

In the Disney classic of the same name, Aladdin is a street urchin who goes from stealing food in markets to hanging out with the Arabian upper class in a matter of minutes after coming across a mystical lamp.

Life has gotten a whole lot better for Aladdin, his kleptomaniac monkey and his sentient flying carpet ... until the evil Jafar steals the magic lamp and uses it to become the most powerful sorcerer in the world. While no one in the movie ever thinks to ask the genie for infinite wishes, Jafar did the next best thing -- he's so powerful that he can now do pretty much anything he wants, from teleporting Aladdin across the world to transforming himself into a giant snake.

Yet for all his power, he could not master the shirt spell.

Things seem pretty hopeless, but Aladdin has one more trick up his sleeve. When Jafar proclaims himself "the most powerful being on Earth," Aladdin taunts him by pointing out that the genie is more powerful. Jafar uses his last wish to become "an all-powerful genie" ... and becomes trapped inside a magic lamp, just as Aladdin planned.

The Blind Luck:

There's only one problem with Aladdin's plan: It was a stupid plan, and it shouldn't have worked. The success of the trick relied entirely on Jafar using the exact words that, by astonishing coincidence, he ended up using. If Jafar had said "I wish to be more powerful than the genie" or "I wish to be the most powerful entity in the universe" or pretty much anything else, then the heroes' situation would have gone from hopeless to ridiculously hopeless.

And yet Aladdin is so convinced that his unlikely, misguided plan will work that he pulls an expression that can only be described as the world's first troll face.

He actually spoke in misspellings.

Or, you know, Jafar could have simply wished for the genie (aka Aladdin's friend) to kill himself in the most gruesome manner imaginable, and he would have been forced to do exactly that. Had the villain taken a moment to consider his wish, the straight-to-video sequels would have been about Jafar continuously raping the Earth for the next millennium.

That was one hell of a gamble, Aladdin.

#1. Ocean's Eleven -- The Whole Plan

Ocean's Eleven is remembered as the best received and most coherent film in the entire Ocean's [number] franchise, before it became apparent that the whole thing was just an experiment to see how many names can be crammed into a movie poster. Here's the plot, in as few words as humanly possible: George Clooney and his 10 most charismatic friends are planning to rob Andy Garcia of three casinos' worth of cash, which is stored in one vault, while being as cool as humanly possible.

Meanwhile, Scott Caan and Casey Affleck pretend to be security guards carrying a box full of Andy Garcia's money into the vault. Except it's not money, it's actually a small Chinese man named Yen who will rig the vault from the inside.

Then Matt Damon makes his way down to the vault, punches in the code and opens the big metal door with help from the Chinese guy. A blackout and some more shocking plot twists later, George Clooney and his friends have successfully ripped Andy Garcia off.

And Brad Pitt finally stops eating.

The Blind Luck:

We're constantly told that this casino has the most insane security in the world because Andy Garcia's character is ruthlessly meticulous about every little aspect of his operation. And yet the whole plan hinges on the notion that everyone working there is very, very bad at their jobs.

For example, on the night of the heist, Scott Caan and Casey Affleck are seen walking around the floor dressed as bodyguards, cooks, security guards and paramedics ... and no one ever notices it's the same two guys. They were one "Haven't I seen you before?" away from ruining the entire heist. In one scene, it's implied that they changed clothes inside an elevator, at which point the guy watching the security feed presumably said, "Eww, gross," and stopped watching.

"Hey, aren't there, like, nine other guys who could be doing this?"

Oh, and how did they get the box containing the Chinese man into the vault without a security card? By arguing with each other about who forgot the card until an actual guard steps in and says, "No worries, I'll bring that in for ya." That wasn't a last minute improvisation, it was the actual plan. No one ever thinks to check the box: They just push it in there and forget about it.

Then there's Garcia himself, which the film has spent an hour establishing as a paranoid genius who leaves nothing to chance. Not only does he completely forget about the super important code in his pocket after Matt Damon steals it, but he also leaves Damon unsupervised in a restricted area when he says he forgot his pager in the room they just left. It would have literally taken him five seconds to wait for Damon to retrieve it and see him to the exit.

Meanwhile, Don Chead -- wait, Don Cheadle's in this movie?!

Basically, George Clooney made a lot of ridiculous assumptions about the casino staff while coming up with the plan, needing them to completely fail to do their jobs at a dozen different points. If even one staff member accidentally does the job right, or just doesn't fail in the exact specific way the Ocean team anticipates, the whole plan is busted. There's only one possible explanation here: Garcia was actually in cahoots with Clooney the whole time as part of a longer con at the expense of everyone else, to be revealed in Ocean's Seventeen.

Jake Ferretti has a comedy website with comics, videos and royalty free music/sound fx at StickItInTheWhat.com. You can also follow him on twitter here.

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